Stephen Fox speaks with Chelsea May, the CEO and co-founder of Kyha, an AI-powered, privacy-first women’s health platform.
In this episode of PE Pathways, Stephen Fox, a member of the health care and life science transactional team, sits down with Chelsea May, CEO and co-founder of Kyha, one of our innovative SEED™ clients from the Emerging Companies + Venture Capital practice that recently presented at the Mid-Atlantic Capital Conference in Philadelphia this past October.
Kyha is a privacy-first, AI-powered women's health platform designed to address the unmet need for trusted, medically backed, personalized answers, with access to certified experts when deeper care is needed. Their conversation explores Kyha's origin story, the power of an all‑female founding team, and practical lessons on startup building and the legal foundations required for growth.
PE Pathways — Early-Stage Spotlight - Kyha’s Approach to Women’s Health
Speakers: Stephen Fox and Chelsea May
Recorded: November 27, 2025
Aired: December 11, 2025
Stephen Fox (00:05):
Welcome to PE Pathways, our podcast series where experienced deal makers share the thoughts of current trends and development in the private equity and M&A markets. I'm Stephen Fox, a member of the Healthcare and Life Sciences transactional team at Troutman Pepper Locke, and excited to host this special episode where we're giving the spotlight to one of our innovative clients from our Emerging Companies and Venture Capital practice. I'm pleased to be joined by Chelsea May, co-founder of Kyha, a privacy first AI companion addressing unmet needs related to gynecological health. Kyha is a client of Troutman through the firm’s SEED™ Program, which provides innovative and affordable opportunities to early stage emerging companies. Kyha also recently presented at the Mid-Atlantic Capital Conference in Philadelphia this past October. Chelsea, congratulations again on your recent presentation and thanks for giving me some time today to talk about your story.
Chelsea May (01:03):
Thanks, Stephen. I'm very happy to be here and having this chat about Kyha and our experience working with Troutman.
Stephen Fox (01:09):
Great. Well, with that out of the way, let's kick things off. I'd be grateful if you could give me some background on why you started Kyha and the unmet market needs that you're trying to address.
Chelsea May (01:19):
Absolutely. So I first came up with the idea around Kyha quite early in my pregnancy actually, when I was feeling pretty frustrated with the cycle tracking app that I was using. It wasn't giving me the answers that I needed to really understand what the changes were happening in my body. And the advice was really generic. It was pretty content heavy and quite fragmented. So I actually flagged this observation with my sister Antonea, who's also a fellow co-founder, and she was immediately connected with the idea. So she actually spoke with Azra, another co-founder of ours. They actually have worked together for many, many years. And Azra also expressed some similar frustrations, particularly about the lack of personalized support for women of different ethnicities and for women with more complex health needs. So together we all came to the table and started talking about the problem at hand, and we realized it wasn't just our experience, it was actually a universal problem.
Once we started to get into the nuts and bolts of it with the research that we were doing early on, it's pretty crazy, Stephen, because women are actually tracking an enormous amount of health data at the moment, and they're unable to get trusted medically backed and personalized answers when they need them. And what we've uncovered is that gynecological health information is quite fragmented across the internet and our healthcare system. So really centralizing that into one trusted platform is the unmet need we're trying to solve. And so the solution that Kyha is bringing to the table is we are a platform for women to get those instant medically backed answers to their health questions. And the answers themselves are personalized based on tracking your cycle, logging your symptoms, and building out that health profile. And for those who need additional care and support, Kyha then connects them to directly with certified health experts. So we've already launched the beta, which I know you are tracking along with us on that. And the focus for us is on perimenopause and menopause because it is one of the most underserved areas in our healthcare system today. But we have aspirations over the next 12 months to really build that out and span the full gynecological life cycle. So from first period through to menopause.
Stephen Fox (03:38):
That's great. I appreciate it. And totally understand where you got the idea. You had the resources, you had the support through your co-founders. How'd you decide to take the jump and start Kyha?
Chelsea May (03:52):
Yeah, I mean it was a leap of faith, but in saying that when we all started talking, we're kind of the perfect trifecta to be able to really take a business with business marketing and sales experience, product and tech and take Kyha from zero to one. So a bit of background on us, co-founder. So Azra, she's got expertise in engineering, AI, and data infrastructure, and then Anton's experience is in product and scaling centralized care platforms. And then my experience is in scaling business operations and launching consumer brands and go to market strategies. So bringing it all together, we felt like we could overcome some of those early execution challenges that founders might face. Some founders might not have somebody that can actually build the product. And then you're investing in early capital upfront. We actually have the skillset and we have been able to deliver it. So we took it from idea through to beta in eight short months based on our experience between the three of us.
Stephen Fox (04:53):
You have all the experience, you and Azra and Antonea, but you're all first time co-founders. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the experience shifting from employee advisor side of these emerging companies to founders.
Chelsea May (05:12):
Absolutely. And a shift is what it is. At the end of the day. We have been operators and working for other people, and as you mentioned now we're founders working for ourselves. So the challenge has been shifting our mentality around not being so focused on execution. Of course, we need to execute. We've got a task list that we need to deliver, but at the same time, we need to be focused on working on the business, not just in the business. And it's incredibly easy to get sucked into execution, but what the company really needs is big picture thinking and forecasting and decision making across all facets of the business. So the three of us have aligned on that. That's probably been the most surprising challenge that we've come up against, but we've made the adjustment and it's really important to us. And so we're getting there and we're looking forward to continuing to grow as founders and learn off of each other and also the people that we've been meeting along the way.
Stephen Fox (06:06):
Did your past experiences prepare you for the challenges of starting your own company or have there been any surprises as far as roadblocks and hurdles?
Chelsea May (06:18):
Yeah, I mean there's always going to be roadblocks and hurdles. I guess one of the upsides of running your own company is that you can be quite agile and move quite quickly. There's not a lot of red tape of waiting for approvals or can we make this decision? But in that same breath, I guess the roadblocks are is we all need to come together as a three of us to make executive decisions on things that we've never had to really make decisions on before. And so some of the hurdles have been just getting that alignment on some key decisions and moving forward. And then also, you're often working for companies that have funding already, like most companies are post revenue, so you don't have to overly spend too much time on how are we going to actually deliver this without a budget. So that's been a bit of a hurdle, of course, is trying to figure out what we can bootstrap on our own to get it to a point that we're really happy with, but doing it in a really smart way. So yeah, not having that funding and having that initial revenue has been a bit of a barrier, but we're working around it and we're making it work.
Stephen Fox (07:25):
Now, I'm sure you have lots of partners helping you make these difficult early-stage decisions. Troutman proud to be one of them. I remember we were speaking after pact and you recounted a story about how everybody was telling you, “you need to engage legal, you need to engage legal” as one of the first things you do in starting a company like this. How's your experience been working with Troutman and lawyers in general? It's probably a new experience as a first-time founder.
Chelsea May (07:58):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, a bit of context there. I think it was super important for me as starting this business to engage legal up front. Nearly seven years ago, I moved into a managing director role, and I spent a lot of months retrofitting legal, you have employees in that aren't even on the correct contracts, for example. So I promised myself, if I were to ever start a company, you need to have legal and finance set up properly from the jump because it just gives you that peace of mind that you can move swiftly when opportunities arise. And so I really believe that legal is a fundamental pillar of starting a business. So working specifically with the Troutman team has been fantastic. It's been a big learning curve for me personally, but Stephen, you and Emily have been really incredible in just guiding us through that incorporation process initially. And also just breaking things down into layman's terms. We just jumped off a call now talking about advisor documentation and things like that. So having templated documents in a framework to follow has been really great for me so that I can take on some of that workload myself, which is I think essential when you're pre-revenue at the moment. So yeah, my experience with you guys has been super streamlined detail – you give enough detail, but not too much to overwhelm. And I personally have had a really great experience working with you guys.
Stephen Fox (09:21):
I appreciate that. I was a little concerned that question could go sideways. As we've discussed, Chelsea, Kyha is comprised of an all-female founder team. How has this fact created any specific opportunities or obstacles in how you built, sold, and fundraised Kyha?
Chelsea May (09:40):
Yeah, that's a really good question, Stephen, and I wish the answer was just like “no!” But the reality is that being an all-female founding team in healthcare does shape how we do these things. So I think it was a couple months ago, the three of us were talking and reflecting back that on our careers, most of the companies that we've worked with are led by men. And even some of the biggest period tracking apps were founded by men. And that's not inherently a bad thing, but I guess it's just highlighted a gap for us that women's health companies often aren't led by the people who are actually living the experiences. And so for us, building Kyha with both our expertise and then also our lived experiences feels quite advantageous for us. And I think what we've also learned in this process as female founders is that investor alignment is really what's going to matter when it comes to fundraising.
So we actually spoke to somebody quite early on in the piece who said to us that find an investor who understands the realities of women's lives, and that really comes down to family, pregnancy, and the mental load that a lot of women do carry because those factors do shape how we work. So a really good example of that is over the last eight months while we've been building Kyha, both Azra and I have had babies, and that hasn't slowed us down. You would think, oh, they had children, they've stopped working. But if anything, it's sharpened our focus and really strengthened our commitment to what we're prioritizing. So going into fundraising for seed at the moment, we're really looking for investors, female or male, who clearly understand that and do have roots in EmTech and who recognize that our lived experiences are actually not a liability, but a perspective that's directly relevant to the problem that we're solving. And we think that's a real strength for Kyha in our opinions.
Stephen Fox (11:30):
Yeah. When you told me you were flying from Australia to Philadelphia with your five-month-old baby, my mind was –
Chelsea May (11:39):
Like, are you crazy?
Stephen Fox (11:42):
Yeah, the thought through my mind, yes.
Chelsea May (11:45):
I think on reflection I was like, oh, that was pretty crazy to do, but it was well worth it.
Stephen Fox (11:50):
Well, we obviously appreciated it. Beta is done. It's out there. Pact is behind you. What's next for Kyha? What's on the horizon?
Chelsea May (12:01):
Well, I'd like to say world domination, but it's probably not that extreme. But I mean, at the end of the day, our vision long-term is to just start to change that conversation around women's health for both women and men. And we do think Kyha is the platform to be able to do that. So over the next 12 months, we're going to have a really key focus on building out Kyha's care and B2B components. So what that care component looks like is we'll be introducing async access to women health experts. That's everyone from OBGYNs and hormone Specialists through to therapists and dieticians. And then from there, we'll be bringing on one-on-one telehealth partnerships so women can get quality care without those barriers of complexity of insurance or long wait times. I think on average right now, women are waiting 31 days to see an OB GYN.
So we want to be able to combat that with our one-on-one telehealth partnerships. And then as it relates to that B2B component and beyond, we're layering in the groundwork for employer partnerships. So I actually recently came across a stat that I think it was between 13 to 15% of women have quit their jobs due to menopause symptoms, and then another 15% are actually considering quitting their jobs. And that's just wild that that's even a percentage. And so we really want to help change that story. So we're going to be bringing Kyha into the workplace through professional employer solutions as part of the long-term vision. So there's a lot happening for Kyha in 2026, and we're also officially launching on the app store in the new year as well. So if anyone's listening and wants early access, head over to our website – little plug here – meetkyha.com and join our wait list as a founding member because it's going to be hitting the app store very, very soon.
Stephen Fox (13:43):
That's what I love about the company is not just the dedication, but the focus on the unmet market need and really serving the customers you're trying to serve. So Chelsea, I really appreciate you spending time with me today. Any parting words?
Chelsea May (14:04):
No parting words per se, but I do, just to round out what you said there around meeting the need, it's like we are the demographic as well, and we are experiencing these problems, and we want to do things differently than our mothers did. I think I heard recently that there was a term that women used to be called “WW”s, so, ‘Whining Women’ as they were going through menopause, and we want to shift that narrative as well. So we're super passionate about what we're doing at Kyha and looking forward to bringing it to everyone.
Stephen Fox (14:30):
Chelsea, fantastic interview. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you to our audience for listening today. Please keep your eyes open for future episodes of PE Pathways where we'll bring experienced deal makers on to share their thoughts of current private equity and M&A trends and developments. You can find the latest wherever you get your podcasts.
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